Custom and Myth eBook

As for the sun-frog, we may hope that he has sunk
for ever beneath the western wave.

A FAR-TRAVELLED TALE.

A modern novelist has boasted that her books are read
’from Tobolsk to Tangiers.’ This
is a wide circulation, but the widest circulation in
the world has probably been achieved by a story whose
author, unlike Ouida, will never be known to fame.
The tale which we are about to examine is, perhaps,
of all myths the most widely diffused, yet there is
no ready way of accounting for its extraordinary popularity.
Any true ‘nature-myth,’ any myth which
accounts for the processes of nature or the aspects
of natural phenomena, may conceivably have been invented
separately, wherever men in an early state of thought
observed the same facts, and attempted to explain
them by telling a story. Thus we have seen that
the earlier part of the Myth of Cronus is a nature-myth,
setting forth the cause of the separation of Heaven
and Earth. Star-myths again, are everywhere
similar, because men who believed all nature to be
animated and personal, accounted for the grouping
of constellations in accordance with these crude beliefs.
{87} Once more, if a story like that of ’Cupid
and Psyche’ be found among the most diverse races,
the distribution becomes intelligible if the myth
was invented to illustrate or enforce a widely prevalent
custom. But in the following story no such explanation
is even provisionally acceptable.

The gist of the tale (which has many different ‘openings,’
and conclusions in different places) may be stated
thus: A young man is brought to the home of a
hostile animal, a giant, cannibal, wizard, or a malevolent
king. He is put by his unfriendly host to various
severe trials, in which it is hoped that he will perish.
In each trial he is assisted by the daughter of his
host. After achieving the adventures, he elopes
with the girl, and is pursued by her father.
The runaway pair throw various common objects behind
them, which are changed into magical obstacles and
check the pursuit of the father. The myth has
various endings, usually happy, in various places.
Another form of the narrative is known, in which
the visitors to the home of the hostile being are,
not wooers of his daughter, but brothers of his wife.
{88} The incidents of the flight, in this variant,
are still of the same character. Finally, when
the flight is that of a brother from his sister’s
malevolent ghost, in Hades (Japan), or of two sisters
from a cannibal mother or step-mother (Zulu and Samoyed),
the events of the flight and the magical aids to escape
remain little altered. We shall afterwards see
that attempts have been made to interpret one of these
narratives as a nature-myth; but the attempts seem
unsuccessful. We are therefore at a loss to account
for the wide diffusion of this tale, unless it has
been transmitted slowly from people to people, in
the immense unknown prehistoric past of the human
race.